SILVER BEARS is one of a crowd of Michael Caine movies from the seventies which, it turns out, deserve to be better known. PULP is, in my view, great, and PEEPER comes close, but is let down by a weak last act. The fact that the climax, with supreme, toe-curling unfortunateness, involves Natalie Wood fighting in a lifeboat, may explain why the film isn’t more often revived.

SILVER BEARS is just very enjoyable. Caine plays a finance expert for the mob who conceives the idea of casino owner Martin Balsam buying his own Swiss bank to store his loot in (as if Swiss banks were notoriously picky about their customers — see also THE HOLCROFT COVENANT for Caine’s continuing PR campaign on behalf of Switzerland’s financial institutions). Caine buys the bank but finds he’s been conned, then gets offered a chance to come in on a silver mine in Iraq, which is right where the Bible says there should be a silver mine…

Ivan Passer directs with deadpan modesty. CUTTER AND BONE is the US film of his with the best reputation, but I prefer BORN TO LOSE, a defiantly uningratiating movie about junkies with George Segal. Like the best US seventies stuff it has a Twilight of the Gods melancholic downfall built in — somebody was bound to make something like JAWS and STAR WARS eventually, and as soon as they did films like this were bound to stop being made. It’s a movie that has no interest in explaining to us why we should care about its lead character. It knows we don’t even care about his real-life counterparts, so what will induce us to get interested in a fictional version? Doesn’t matter. He’s a human being. We SHOULD care. A brief early appearance by DeNiro, unusually cast as a cop, also enlivens.

SILVER BEARS is positively jolly by comparison, and it has an even more impressive cast — Caine and Balsam are supported by a host of co-stars, most of them on their last legs as box office phenomena — Cybill Shepherd, Louis Jourdan, David Warner, Stephan Audran, Tommy Smothers, plus Charles Gray, Joss Ackland and a fleeting Nigel Patrick. And Jay Leno, for God’s sake, who turns out to be a very funny actor. Maybe he just didn’t want to go on playing idiots and low-lifes.

Caine is very funny (“He’s not a fag, he’s just English,” explains Balsam), caught midway between the Adonis of the sixties and the puffy-eyed, blotchy Caine of pay cheque fame. Fiona felt Louis Jourdan stole the show, though. And David Warner looks like this ~

A big hand for Bernard Gribble’s editing, which enhances the comedy with slow-burn reaction shots. Jourdan steals the show, but it’s one of Shepherd’s good jobs too, and Caine is very funny. There’s a great bit of exposition delivered while marching at high speed through a stately home, led by Gray (one of the stately homos of England, as Quentin Crisp would have it). Good bit with Jourdan and Audran slapping each other — a dicey moment to get laughs with, but she sells it by looking more shocked when she slaps him than when he slaps her. Her surprised face looks like the outrage alien at the end of the Star Trek end credits.

Peter Stone, who scripted CHARADE, has some good short circuits stored up for getting out of predictable situations in unpredictable ways. When Cybill realizes Caine slept with her to get info on her husband’s bank, she only pretends to be furious for the sake of appearances, for as she immediately explains, she realizes that he did her three times in one night, which was far more than necessary to learn what he needed to know. It’s a lightweight movie but it has enough inventions like that to keep me charmed.

…when posting just feels like keeping the blog going rather than having anything to say. So why say anything? Here is a photo of David Hemmings as a tiny bee.

Interactive bit: use the “Search” function to the right on the main page (scroll down) to look up your favourite movie, person or thing, and read an old post about it. Then leave a comment. I like it when old posts come back to life. Further down is a “Recent Comments” bit where you can see if any other old posts have attracted comments, and join in. Blog archaeology! “Let’s revisit the scenes of our youth,” as Louis Jourdan is always saying.

Pauline Kael admired it. Its own director dismissed it. But neither of these facts need unduly influence us — like it or love it or hate it or be indifferent, NO MINOR VICES (1948) is a very odd, original little film.

I say “original,” but it should first be admitted that Lewis Milestone’s film shares a central set-up with Lubitsch’s THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING, in which Merle Oberon is tempted away from her bourgeois married existence with Melyvn Douglas by a romance with neurotic New York artist Burgess Meredith. Well, in NO MINOR VICES, substitute Lilli Palmer, Dana Andrews and Louis Jourdan and the rest can stay as it is. But it doesn’t, exactly. Whereas Lubitsch did what Lubitsch does, hampered by the fact that his leading man and leading lady were capable but not fiery, and his comic antagonist is very funny but not quite appealing enough, Milestone has perfect leads and still amps things up furiously with expressionist tricks, cartoon sound effects, imaginary sequences, hallucinatory POV shots and various other shenanigans supplied by Arnold Manoff’s script.

Lilli Palmer is charming and beautiful as usual, Dana Andrews is wonderfully understated as usual, and both demonstrate how to turn their dramatic gifts to the services of outrageous screwball comedy. The real surprise, though, is Jourdan, who supplies the outrageous screwball element, flamboyant and wild-eyed, a little camp, and very intense, like the light comedy version of Bruno in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN.

Milestone happily serves up the required japes, but we never forget he’s a proper director: he’s able to send up the tricks of dramatic filmmaking by pushing them too far or by applying them to goofy situations, and some of his compositions are just beautiful.

Strong support from Norman Lloyd as a milquetoast pediatrician. It seemed odd, hearing the familiar velvet voice of the man who pronounced Fiona and I man and wife, issuing from this boyish fellow.

Cinematographer George Barnes also worked on SPELLBOUND, so the modern art elements must have been up his street. Funny how in high-class Hollywood movies modern art is always represented by Dali knockoffs and modern music by ersatz Gershwin. Here, Franz Waxman delivers suitable variations on Rhapsody in Blue so we get both at once — a rich pudding indeed.

I’d love to know who did the drawings Jourdan tosses off — perhaps somebody out there will recognize the style?

Norman has a fine collection of newspaper cartoons of himself, but he doesn’t seem to have this one. I hope the original was preserved.